The ejector seats that fire through the floor

For traditionally-shaped planes (delta wings work differently) there's a fairly straightforward tradeoff between big wings to increase lift at low speeds and small wings to reduce drag at high speed. Flaps help but there's a limit to how much you can change the shape of a wing in flight. So if you build a plane to go very fast, you tend to end up with a plane that has a high minimum speed as well, which makes take off and especially landing difficult.

My dad said flying a jet out of Denver was always a challenge because the jet would just lumber along refusing to develop power. (Denver is at high altitude.) He'd always start the takeoff roll with the tail hanging over the edge of the runway start.

Truth be told, the Starfighter was an interceptor, designed to carry air-to-air missiles fast towards approaching Soviet strategic bombers. That's it, nothing else. The German Airforce wanted a multi-role fighter, some creative Lockheed marketing assured the the Starfighter was bought in the F-104G variant. At that G-variant turned it into a brick to fly, stall speeds close to minimum take off speeds among other things.

The starfighter's safety record with other operators was a lot better.

In Holland it also had a very bad name due to Lockheed's bribery of the royal family, which shouldn't even have had any influence on such matters anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Gee_Bee_Model_R_Supe...

The P-38 is cool, too :-)

If humans were a hive mind where cooperation was assured, you'd still need destructive capabilities against the environment, and perhaps other species.

That humans strive for the capacity of violence doesn't surprise or sadden me. What does sadden me is that much of our pinacle of technological development happens with the explicit goal of violent capacity. And the fact that rough parity in our violent capacity is generally the only thing keeping big states from expansion.

For example, retreating soldiers are absolutely still combatants but on the other hand sailors on a life raft are not. Is an ejected pilot like a retreating infantryman or like a sailor on a liferaft? The solution the drafters came up with is that he's a non-combatant while descending but once again becomes a combatant once landed.

The first Manchester prototype flew just five weeks before WW2 started, and might have been rushed into production.

But there were major flaws with the reliability and power of the engines, and Avro were already working on the Lancaster to replace the Manchester before the first production models even entered service.

The Lancaster is simply a Manchester, with the two Rolls-Royce Vulture engines replaced by four Merlin engines.